Pictures of the day: 24 January 2013

An image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way, floating in space nearly 200,000 light-years from Earth. Vast clouds of gas within it slowly collapse to form new stars. In turn, these light up the gas clouds in a riot of colours.Picture: NASA / Barcroft Media